. 1863–1952. Born in Madrid, he worked at Harvard and then in Europe, dying at Rome. An apparently paradoxical figure, a Catholic agnostic who attacked broadchurchmanship and religious and political liberalism, an aesthetically minded Platonist who called himself a materialist, a rejector of modern ideas of inevitable progress who admired the pragmatist William James, he accepted our impulses for what they were but treated reason as a further impulse, a neutral integrator of the rest. He believed in essences, but not as a superior realm. The ordinary world exists, and we must start from ordinary beliefs, and not seek the illusory foundations sought in vain by the sceptic. How far his philosophy changed in his later works is controversial.
The Sense of Beauty, 1896. The Life of Reason (five volumes), 1905–6. Winds of Doctrine, 1913 (criticisms). Scepticism and Animal Faith, 1923. Realms of Being (four volumes, on Essence, Matter, Truth, Spirit), 1927–40, in single volume with new introduction, 1942. Dominations and Powers, 1951 (social philosophy).
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